Fic: The Kin of Cain, FOB x SPN, 2/3
The Kin of Cain, continued from part one.
* * * * *
They hightailed it out of there as soon as Andy stopped throwing up. They were all shaken, not just the boys but Sam and Dean as well. The Winchesters had seen cruelty before, they had seen violence and they had seen brutality, but they had never witnessed quite this level of gluttony. That thing, whatever it was, hadn't just taken pleasure in killing-it had indulged in it, gorged itself not just on human flesh but on the act of extracting it.
Andy stumbled out of Pete and Patrick's intact bathroom, wiping his mouth and apologising embarrassedly.
Dean waved the apology away, bundled him into the back of the Impala and made the other three boys drive off first so they could keep an eye on them. He felt pretty safe about their escape: they had checked in under fake names, of course, and all the other survivors had fled the scene as well, making their actions typical rather than suspicious.
"You guys seriously do this for a living," Andy said once his tremors had subsided. "Seriously."
"Yeah," Sam answered dully.
Dean kept his eyes forward and concentrated on the road ahead of him, on the white square of the back of Fall Out Boy's van and its cracked licence plate, its bumper covered with stickers of bands he'd never heard of.
"All the time," Andy said. "This is your life."
Sam sighed heavily. "Yeah."
Andy looked out the window and watched the passing scenery in silence for a while. Dean was reminded of the first night, when they had effectively kidnapped Fall Out Boy. It had been less than a week before, but it now suddenly felt like an eternity ago, a different lifetime.
"We didn't believe you, you know," Andy said, out of the blue. He was still looking out the window. "We went along with it because we didn't want more of our fans getting killed, but we didn't actually believe that there's a monster, or that you guys are monster hunters. Patrick even kind of thought maybe you guys were serial killers, like maybe you were the ones who killed all those people and then made up this crazy story to cover it up. But. I mean. Obviously." Andy's eyes stayed glued to the nightscape outside his passenger window. "That back there? That wasn't done by anything known to man."
"We're the real deal," Sam said softly. Wistfully.
Andy shifted in his seat. "Yeah."
* * * * *
They drove until they hit the first internet café they could find, at which Sam hunkered down with his laptop and spent the whole day mainlining caffeine and doing research.
Dean hovered nearby, wanting to help but having no aptitude for this aspect of their job. He was a man of action. He didn't see looking up dragons on Wikipedia as action.
After last night, Dean was no longer worried about making sure Fall Out Boy didn't run off before the job was over. They were going to stick with the Winchesters until the evil stalking them was stopped. In fact, they were staying close of their own volition, even though Dean had made it clear that they were free to go off for the rest of the day, as long as they were all back together before the sun set. Pete and Joe logged onto computers near Sam, updating their blogs or whatever it was kids did these days. Patrick and Andy were at the payphones up near the front of the café, calling their mothers, their cell phones long out of batteries and their chargers inexplicably not with them.
"A dragon, Sam? Really?" Dean was eating a large chocolate zucchini muffin, the only way he would willingly allow zucchini to enter his mouth. He wiped the crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand, and then wiped his hand on the front of his jeans.
Sam spared a second to give him a nauseated look, then went back to his monitor. "Yes, a dragon. Long, scaly, reptilian, claws, and wings. What else could it be?"
"Yeah, but don't you think it's a little far-fetched? I mean, our lives are weird, but not living in Lord of the Rings weird. This isn't a movie."
"You and Dad once hunted an evil clown that killed people. Just like in the movie. How is this any more far-fetched?"
"I don't know." Dean munched on his muffin. "It's just. Dragons, man. If they really exist how come we've never heard about it? How come Dad's never heard of them, or Bobby?"
"We deal with undocumented stuff every day," Sam said stubbornly. "It's kind of the point."
Sam shut him out after that, going into his serious researcher mode and becoming deaf and blind to all outside distractions. Dean left him to hang out with Fall Out Boy for a bit. Their technological needs fulfilled, they were now on the sidewalk outside the café, where a group of girls in skin-tight jeans and candy-coloured hoodies had recognized them. The girls, somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, Dean guessed, were mostly fawning over Pete.
Remembering what Joe had told him about Pete's affinity for females of the underage persuasion, Dean readied himself to break up yet another fight between Pete and Patrick. He didn't need to, though, as Pete's heart was clearly not in it. He shook hands and took cell phone pictures, signed a few shirts, but he wasn't turning on the flirtatious charm. His eyes were large and serious when he told them to stay safe and be careful not to go out alone at night. Dean knew it was because of what happened at the motel last night, but to a third-party observer Pete probably sounded creepy as fuck. The girls loved it.
They hugged Patrick, Joe, and Andy as well, before leaving in a giggling swarm. Their MySpace pages were gonna be an explosion of adolescent oestrogen tonight. Dean shuddered inside. Ugh, how could anybody enjoy the company of teenaged girls? Pete was a freak.
"I don't know why they pay so much attention to shitty ol' me," Pete said, half coy and half genuinely self-deprecating. "You guys deserve at least as much attention."
"It's because we don't keep a cam-whore diary about our depressive insomnia and spread it all over the internet," Andy told him.
Patrick nudged Andy violently. For a second, Andy looked as though he would shove Patrick back, but thought better of it and just grit his teeth. He mumbled a sorry. Pete pretended he didn't notice the whole exchange and continued to say, "I mean, Patrick should have at least as many twelve-year-olds sending him pictures of their tits as I do, if not more."
Patrick looked horrified. "No, I shouldn't. I really, really shouldn't."
"But you're the frontman! You're the voice of the machine! You breathe us into life!"
"No, Pete, you are," Patrick said. He adjusted his hat awkwardly, taking it off and ruffling his hair with the same hand before putting it back on again. "You're the puppetmaster. You are the dreamer, and we are the dream, remember?"
Dean caught Andy and Joe exchanging eye messages again, realised this was another band in-thing he would never understand. Was this what him and Sam looked like to outsiders? All cryptic, speaking in tongues and referencing unnameable hurts? Or was it specifically a Fall Out Boy thing, a Pete and Patrick thing?
As though summoned, Sam appeared behind them. "Hey. I found it."
Back in the café, on Sam's laptop, was an encyclopaedia entry on something called a lindworm. Dean and the boys crowded around to read it.
"You're sure this is what you saw?" Dean asked, only slightly sceptically.
"It was a gigantic snake with wings and T. Rex arms," Sam replied. "Pretty hard to mistake it for anything else."
A lindworm, according to Sam's research, was a Northern European dragon-type monster with the ability to grow to phenomenal sizes. Its bite was most likely poisonous, and it had a taste for human flesh. "Dragons were often a symbol of greed in early Norse and English folklore, which would explain why it slaughters so much more than it can eat at one time," Sam said. "All the points fit everything we've seen of this thing. I think we've got a positive I.D."
"Okay, so what do we have to do to kill it?"
"I'm still working on that," Sam said. "The two most important pieces of literature on killing lindworms are the myth of Ragnar from Saxo Grammaticus and the story of Fafnir from-"
"From the Volsunga saga," Pete said.
"Yes." Sam frowned. "How do you know that?"
"I have it in the back of the van," Pete answered with a shrug. "Or a copy of it, bought it from a used bookstore for a quarter when I couldn't sleep one night."
"Why in the name of hell would you have that?" Dean asked, in the tone of voice one would normally use for asking why somebody would eat shit. Disgust comingled with morbid curiosity. Pete was even more of a freak than he'd already thought.
"I don't know, I read a lot," Pete said. "I read Beowulf for college English before I dropped out, and I remembered it referenced the Volsunga saga a lot in the footnotes. I saw it in the store that one time and recognised the title." Seeing Dean's expression, he began to get defensive. "Look, it's a pretty good read, okay. There's a lot of battles and monster slaying, you'd probably like it."
"Pfft, I doubt that," Dean said. He had seen the movie version of Beowulf, and that was as close as he was getting to any of this nerdery.
Sam gives Dean a hard look to prevent him from bringing them any further off topic. "That's great, Pete. I'll need to borrow that. And our friend Bobby has found someone who's willing to sell me their copy of Saxo's Gesta Danorum in the next town over, so we can figure this shit out tonight."
* * * * *
Sam's eyesight finally gave out around midnight. He had spent all afternoon and evening reading tiny print and taking notes, and now his eyeballs felt ready to leak down his face in hot, runny streams. He decided to call it a night, take a walk to stretch his legs and look at some scenery to save his eyes before going to bed on the backseat of the Impala.
Fall Out Boy had resolutely insisted that they camp out tonight, and maybe every night until the lindworm was stopped. They wanted to be as far away as possible from innocent civilians, wanted no more blood on their consciences. After a prolonged argument, the Winchesters had relented. And so they were here, parked off the highway just outside of city limits, quite possibly on a rancher's private property, but there was no farmhouse as far as the eye could see and Dean figured if they couldn't see an owner then the owner couldn't see them either. The boys were well-equipped to sleep in the van, which was stocked with sleeping bags and pillows, since they spent more time on the road than even Sam and Dean did.
They had built a fire, though the summer was warm enough to make it unnecessary. It was more for comfort than anything, a false sense of security provided by the light keeping darkness at bay. By the flickering firelight, Sam could see that his brother was already asleep, hunched uncomfortably in the Impala. The boys were sleeping in the van with the back doors opened, allowing Joe to stretch his legs and hang his feet out. Sam could only make out three slumbering forms, though.
Patrick was still up, standing just barely within the circle of light cast by the fire, facing out towards the night. Sam approached him with deliberately noisy footsteps so as to not startle him, but he still jumped when Sam said "hey."
"Fuck," Patrick said in a whoosh of breath. "You scared me. What are you doing out here?"
"Got tired of reading half-translated Latin, thought I'd take a break and clear my head before going to bed. What about you?"
Patrick sighed, a surprisingly beleaguered sound for someone so young. "I just wanted to get away from the guys for a bit. You get a little stir crazy when you're basically trapped in a small metal box together for weeks on end."
"Especially when one of them's Pete?" Sam hazarded to suggest.
Patrick laughed, not so much in mirth as in exhaustion. "Yeah, I guess. Although Andy's starting to get right up there, with his 'how is us slaughtering a dragon any different from a dragon slaughtering a person' vegan shit."
Sam blinked in surprise. "Oh. Um, I didn't know he-"
"Don't worry about it. He doesn't actually believe we should just let this thing run free. He just feels like somebody should advocate for it since it can't stand up for itself. If he thought he was starting to convince any of us, he'd stop saying it. It's more of a principles thing than a real life application thing." Patrick laughed the same hollow laugh again.
They stood in silence for a little while, Sam unable to think of an appropriate response and Patrick uninterested in conversation. They gazed out into shadows, across the vast field they couldn't see. Patrick shivered subconsciously.
"So. About Pete," Sam began, knowing he might be out of line but asking anyway. "What are these pills you guys keep fighting about?"
Patrick immediately looked guarded. "It's none of your business."
"I'm not trying to be nosy. I just need to know if it's something serious, because I don't know how this dragon thing will go down and if he needs medical attention or something…"
Patrick sucked in air between his teeth. Maybe it hadn't really struck him fully, until that moment, that they were actually going to confront the creature capable of what happened at that motel. "It isn't…it's just. It's medication to manage his depression and help him sleep. It's not like-he doesn't take them half the time anyway," he said, a hint of anger in his tone. "I wish he would just listen. They'd work if he gave them time to, but he says they "wash out the colours," like his life is a fucking shower of rainbows otherwise." Patrick did that thing with his hat again, his nervous habit of taking it off, mussing his hair, and then jamming it back on. "He says they wash out my voice."
Once again, Sam remembered what Joe said about them being the golden ticket. "Is it really about the medicine, though?"
Patrick cocked his head to look at him, like he couldn't quite believe what Sam just asked. With their toes nudging the threshold between glowing light and dark wilderness, and their minds overtired, it was all starting to feel a little surreal. Sam couldn't believe they were having this conversation himself.
"He thinks I'm so much more than I actually am," Patrick said, not answering Sam's question, or perhaps answering it much more truthfully than Sam had expected him to. "He talks like I'm the answer to the question, sometimes, like I know what the fuck is even going on. There's this…sometimes I feel like he lowers himself just so he can look up at me and keep the illusion going, you know?"
And yes, Sam did know, thoroughly and exactly, even though he wasn't Patrick and Dean was his brother. "Have you ever said any of this to Pete?" he asked.
Patrick glanced at him, sidelong again. "Well, it doesn't work that way, does it?"
And Sam knew exactly what he meant by that too.
* * * * *
The next day, Sam and Dean not so subtly made sure all of the boys rode in the van so that they could talk shop in the Impala, alone.
"Like all traditional dragon killings, lindworms are killed by sword," Sam said, debriefing his brother on everything he's managed to learn in the past 24 hours.
Dean groaned. "How the hell are we supposed to get close enough to use a sword without getting eaten?"
Sam's lips quirked. "Well, according to Saxo Grammaticus, the legendary Viking king Ragnar Loðbrok is famous for killing a giant, poisonous lindworm while wearing fur trousers. In fact, "loðbrok" means "hairy britches" in Old Norse, and if it was significant enough to be codified into his name, maybe it's important to the dragonslaying, somehow."
"I'm not running around in furry pants, what the fuck is wrong with you? What else do you got?"
Sam's amused smile slid away. "There's also the myth of Fafnir, in the Volsunga saga Pete lent me," he began. He was slightly uncomfortable bringing this one up. It was stupid, but something about it just struck a little too close to home. "Fafnir was a dwarf who teamed up with his brother to kill their father and get the father's gold. Afterwards, Fafnir didn't want to split to gold. He turned into a dragon, hoarding all the gold for himself. His brother sent Sigurd to kill the lindworm that used to be Fafnir, and Sigurd hid in a trench and plunged his sword right into Fafnir's heart when Fafnir walked over him. The gold turns out to be cursed, anyway, so Fafnir's brother dies at the end too."
"Huh."
Silence expanded in the Impala like a palpable thing. Dean slapped at the stereo dials until Lynyrd Skynyrd relieved it somewhat.
"So let's say we ignore that Fafnir one," Dean said, three songs later.
"Yes," Sam agreed, just a little too quickly.
"I bet Pete knows where we can get pants made out of fun-fur, the weirdo motherfucker."
Pete did know, to nobody's surprise. They stopped at the store he indicated early in the afternoon, and they bought a pair for everybody, although no one really believed it would work.
"Dragons are scared of fur pants? Not fur shirts, or actual fur on an animal, but fur pants specifically. In what universe does that even make sense?" Patrick said, verging on hysterical.
Dean was inclined to agree with him, but he kept that to himself. What he actually said was, "Rock salt keeps ghosts away, and demons are scared of gibberish scribbles. It doesn't have to make sense, as long as it works. Trust me."
Patrick's somewhat panicked doubts weren't too hard to handle, but Dean and Sam had a bit more trouble with convincing them to start sleeping in the proximity of other citizens again. For the first few days after the motel attack, the Winchesters allowed them to camp out. It was apparent that the lindworm only liked to attack when it could cause maximum damage; but they couldn't avoid it forever.
"What if even more people die this time?" Andy demanded. They were parked messily on the shoulder of a highway, ostensibly so Dean could take a piss but really so they could corner the boys on the topic of staying in towns to lure the dragon back.
"We're ready for it this time, no one's gonna die," Sam replied, although they all knew that was far from being a certainty.
"It's too risky," Pete agreed.
"You can't live in the wild and never see other people for the rest of your lives," Sam reasoned. "And even if you did, there's no guarantees it won't pick some other group of people to stalk and kill. There's only one way to end this for good."
In the end, Sam and Dean's argument prevailed and Fall Out Boy agreed to check into an inn in the next town. Somewhere in the back of their minds, they knew just as well that they couldn't keep running from the problem until the end of time. Eventually, they would have to confront it, and accept the losses as they came.
Pete, Patrick, and Andy returned to the van. Joe lingered behind. "Can I ride with you guys again?" he asked when Dean raised an inquiring eyebrow at him.
Sam shrugged, and Dean waved at him to get in. Dean waited until they were on the road again to ask why.
"I dig your music," Joe said.
"Good answer."
"We take turns choosing the music in the van, and Patrick's going through some kind of bebop jazz phase. I don't hate it, but classic rock makes me feel a lot better when things are shitty."
"I hear you, man," Dean said. "Driver chooses the music in this car, and I never let this kid drive because he listens to talk radio. Talk radio, can you believe that? It's like we're not even related." Dean shook his head. "Carpooling with one other person is bad enough-I can't even imagine going four to a van."
"Nah, it's alright," Joe said, leaning forward to rest his elbows against the back of their seats. Sam checked to make sure he was wearing his seatbelt, because he couldn't help being the responsible one. Someone had to be. "It's not that bad," Joe continued, "Those guys are my best friends in the world, I wouldn't want to get stuck in a van for five months straight with anyone else. It just gets a little old, being all up in each other's drama. Every now and then I feel like I'm a permanent third wheel in Pete and Patrick's Epic Romance Across America."
Dean laughed. He liked Joe's company. There was something free about him, something laid back and unhurried. Aside from his obviously excellent taste in music and his street smarts, he also had some indescribable quality that drew Dean to him. To be honest, Joe was the kind of person Dean imagined he might make if he had been told to create a little brother for himself. Sam was like a stranger to him, sometimes. It felt like they had nothing in common but a fucked up childhood, and even that they remembered differently. Some higher power had seen fit to give him a Sam instead of a Joe, and Dean would never hesitate to admit that it had been a good decision. He loved Sam, inexplicable as he was, and he wouldn't trade him for anything. Still, it was nice that Joe was here, to let Dean enjoy a glimpse of what might have been if their father hadn't been John Winchester.
True to their word, Fall Out Boy followed Sam and Dean into the inn they picked at the end of the day. They split into two groups, Dean with Joe and Pete in one room and Sam with Patrick and Andy in another, armed with blades and feeling ridiculous about their fun-fur pants. They stayed up all night, cold sweat in their eyes and hearts in their mouths, twitching at the smallest noise.
But no lindworm came.
They drove out of town the next morning, numb with fatigue and unspent adrenaline. "When do you think it'll attack this time?" Joe asked Dean from the backseat of the Impala.
Dean had no idea. He just knew that in the mean time, he was going to spend every night like last night, sword at the ready and nerves on tripwires until the fucker came back, and he wasn't looking forward to it one bit.
* * * * *
Several mornings later, Dean was arming himself to hunt his favourite type of troll when Andy approached him.
"What the hell are you doing?" Andy demanded, eyeing the various hammers, shovels, and hoes Dean was busily strapping to himself.
"There's a town nearby where people are losing their babies and their silverware. Sam is 99% sure it's a troll infestation. We're gonna go whack the shit out of them. Wanna roll with?"
Andy bit his lip. "Shouldn't you be helping us with our monster problem?"
"You're not the only ones with monster problems. We can't do anything until it shows up again, and we're not gonna sit around wasting time waiting for it. There are baby-stealing things out there that need to be wasted." Dean hefted a sledgehammer appraisingly, then put it back into the Impala's trunk. "Are you coming, or do you need to babysit Romeo and Juliet?"
Andy glanced at Pete and Patrick's motel room door where a "Do Not Disturb" sign hung jauntily on the knob, which could mean any number of things, not necessarily just what Dean was implying. Still, they probably wouldn't be coming out of there until at least noon.
"Yeah. Let me write a note for Joe and I'll-"
"No need," Joe said, following Sam out of the motel's questionable café with a tray of steaming paper cups. "I've been up and at 'em since seven a.m., learning all about trolls." He grinned. "Coffee?"
Andy accepted a cup and piled into the back of the Impala with Joe. They peeled out of the parking lot in a cloud of dust, and in under an hour they were stopping by a forest two miles out of the afflicted town. It didn't occur to Andy until after they had parked the car and stepped out to ask, "How exactly do you waste a troll, anyway?"
Sam motioned at him to be quiet. He and Dean were walking up to what looked like an old, rotten, possibly hollow tree. Andy and Joe followed a safe distance behind. Dean pulled out a shovel and banged it against the side of the tree. Seconds later, something gray and knee-high leapt out from the trunk, shrieking bloody murder. Dean hauled his shovel back and swung, planting the flat of the shovel squarely into the gray thing's gnarled face. It burst on contact, not into gore but into a cloud of dust and what looked suspiciously like sparkles.
"That," Dean said happily, "is how you waste a troll."
Trolls usually infested towns in groups of at least a dozen, so Dean and Sam tramped up and down the woods looking for likely dens. When they found one, they literally just whacked it into oblivion, showering the forest floor in sparkling dust.
"Man, that is so cool," Joe said with awe, watching them work. Andy agreed.
"Do you guys want to try it? Dean asked, offering up one of his hammers.
It pained Andy to refuse, but he lived and died by his vegan beliefs and his commitment was unwavering. "I can't kill anything with eyes or a mother," Andy pronounced, for once in his life with regret instead of pride.
Dean laughed at him, but at least Sam had the decency to act like he respected Andy's life choices. Joe had no such compunction to hold him back and enthusiastically accepted the weapon. They spent the next two hours ridding the area of trolls, Andy looking on jealously. Sam declared their work done when he built a small fire and threw some oil of witch-hazel into it, and no trolls attacked them.
"How do you know stuff like that?" Andy asked as they hiked back to the car, brushing troll dust off themselves.
"Our dad taught us a lot of it," Dean said. "And Sam knows a whole bunch of witchy stuff because he's a geek."
Sam pummelled Dean's shoulder good-naturedly in response.
They were in high spirits on the ride back, the adrenaline of the successful expedition still in their systems. Dean blasted Iron Maiden, Joe sang along, Andy air-drummed, and Sam demonstrated his good humour by tolerating them.
They returned to the motel to the sight of Pete meticulously arranging candy hearts on the parking lot asphalt to spell out "PATRICK RULES, PETE DROOLS."
Dean and Sam exchanged a look.
"What did you do this time," Joe asked as soon as he opened the car door.
"I may or may not have peed on his clothes when I got mad," Pete hedged.
"For god's sake!" Andy exclaimed.
"It wasn't all of his clothes! Just the ones lying out of his bag! Anyway, where the hell have you guys been? There's glitter in your hair."
Andy and Dean both swiped at their heads furiously, shaking out the troll dust. Sam was too busy documenting this hunt for future records to care, and Joe just plain didn't care. "We whacked trolls!" he told Pete with delight.
"I didn't," Andy groused bitterly.
"It was amazing," Joe continued, filling Pete in on what he had missed.
Pete was about to reply when a woman walked by to retrieve her car, almost stepping right into Pete's candy creation. "Hey, watch it!" he yelled, all but shoving her away. She levelled a dirty look at him and later pulled out of the parking lot with a screech of tires.
"I better show this to Patrick before it gets ruined," Pete said to them. Dean raised an eyebrow.
"PAAAAATRIIIIIICK!" Pete bellowed.
"Shut the hell up!" a man in room 208 replied. Patrick himself did not reply.
"If you don't come out, I'll just keep screaming your name until someone kills me," Pete called. There was no response, and Pete inhaled in preparation to yell again when their room's door opened.
"What the fuck do you want?" Patrick stomped toward them, expression black, wearing one of Pete's shirts, which was two sizes too small.
Pete displayed his candy message with a flourish.
Patrick's face visibly softened; Dean could see it all the way from the other side of the Impala.
"You're an idiot," Patrick said, kicking his foot into Pete's name and turning it into a mess of hearts. "And this is a waste of food."
"No it's not. You can still eat it."
"You put it on the ground, Pete."
"So? I'd still eat it. Here, watch-"
"Please don't," Patrick said hurriedly.
Pete, who had picked up one of the candy hearts, didn't put it into his mouth. Instead he held it out to Patrick between his thumb and forefinger. "Forgive me?"
"Never," Patrick said, but his voice was so warm that he might as well have said yes. He took the piece of candy and put it into his breast pocket. "Look at this, I have to wear your stupid tight shirt until we find a laundromat. It doesn't fit. You can see my rolls."
"Shut up," Pete said. He pinched Patrick's side and said it looked cute. Patrick swatted him away.
Dean, who had held his tongue all this time, finally cleared his throat. "Are we all good now, ladies? Can we go? Or do we have to paint our nails and braid each other's hair, too?"
Patrick snorted at him. "You're one to talk, with all that glitter in your hair."
Dean shook his head like a wet dog, muttering something about needing a shower, but they had no time. They had to press on, and press on they did, with a roar of engines and a squeal of tires on hot asphalt, leaving a plume of dust and a jumble of candy hearts behind.
* * * * *
More than a week had passed since the attack at the motel, and they were all starting to get accustomed to living in unfulfilled terror every night. They were still vigilant, but boredom was starting to creep into their routine, because the fucking lindworm just would. Not. Show. Up.
Dean knew it was dangerous, knew it was when your alertness started to get anaesthetized from overuse that the enemy was most likely to strike, catching you off guard and weak. He knew it, but rational knowledge was no help against warding off the inevitable tedium. You got tired of being scared, and then you got scared of being not scared enough, until you arrived at the point they now all inhabited: tired of being scared of being tired of being scared.
Joe rode with the Winchesters more often than not, and occasionally Andy switched with him. Patrick rode with them once too, to "get away" as well-it amused Sam to think of the Impala as a mini vacation spot for the boys, amusing mostly because the Impala was so much the exact opposite of a vacation for himself. Riding with Joe was fun in the purest sense of the word; riding with Andy was blessedly quiet; riding with Patrick was a little like riding with the professor Sam briefly had for an introduction to music history course he only took to impress a girl and then dropped when that girl started dating someone else.
Patrick knew a lot about music. He lacked Joe's exuberance for the air-guitar, but he had a different kind of enthusiasm, a deeply nerdy one that Sam could relate to. His comparative analysis of Metallica versus Anthrax lasted half an hour straight, with no pauses and no word in edgewise from either Dean or Sam. When he finally finished, Sam kind of felt like he should applaud. Dean actually did applaud, using his elbows to drive for a minute as he put his hands together in what may have been a slightly sarcastic slow clap.
Patrick blushed when he realised how much he had been rambling. "Sorry, guys. I get caught up sometimes."
"No, that was awesome," Dean assured him.
With no warning or further provocation, Patrick asked Dean, "Are you one of those people who hate the St. Anger album because it has no solos? You seem like one of those people."
Unbeknownst to Sam, Dean had apparently been waiting for someone to ask him that very question for ages. It was like turning on a heavy metal fountain. Sam was completely left out of the animated discussion that ensued, which culminated in Dean proclaiming his love for the "Enter Sandman" guitar solo in what can only be described as semi-orgasmic rapture.
Sam didn't know whether to roll his eyes, laugh at Dean, smile affectionately, or be kind of afraid.
Patrick, just as excited by the conversation as Dean, told Dean that both he and Joe could play the solo that nearly had Dean creaming his jeans.
"No way. No fucking way. Are you serious?"
"Joe knows it better than me, but yeah. I know the "Fade to Black" solo better than him. We could probably have a Metallica guitar solo battle."
"You should."
"Yeah, guitar duel to the death."
"No, I mean you should," Dean said. "Tonight. Let's do it. Teach me some chords. I want to see some solos."
Patrick laughed, embarrassed again. "I don't know…"
But Dean possessed a special brand of relentlessness that Fall Out Boy knew nothing about, and Patrick ended up giving into it Joe was, of course, overjoyed when the idea was proposed to him, and that was how they ended up all crowded into one hotel room together.
Patrick and Joe couldn't play with amps, obviously, not only because most of their equipment was in a trailer waiting for them to get back to their real lives in some distant city, but also because they didn't want to get kicked out of the hotel. The resultant melody sounded far more tinny than any Metallica song ever did, but Dean still loved every second of it. Patrick and Joe went back and forth for a while, playing everything they knew and improvising the bits they didn't know, until their Metallica repertoire was entirely depleted. They tried to teach Dean a few easy progressions, but Dean had clumsy fingers, scarred over by years of hunting and insensitive to guitar strings. It was still more fun than Dean could remember having in a long time.
They stayed up late into the night, and by the time they realised they should go to bed they were too tired to split up into the two-pronged battle formation they had been using. The boys didn't mind sleeping on the floor-some of them were indeed already asleep on the floor.
"To hell with the other room," Dean said with a shrug. "Safety in numbers anyway."
After making sure the perimeters were secure and everyone was armed should the need arise, Sam and Dean went to sleep as well.
And woke, with a distinct sense of déjà vu, to the sound of screaming.
Dean scrambled up, took a second to make sure his stupid fucking fur pants were on, and then hurled himself out the door with his sword raised. He didn't need to look to know that Sam was right behind him.
Out in the hall, it wasn't hard to tell where exactly the lindworm was. Many of the doors had been flung wide open by people running out in terror, but only one door was ripped right out of the wall along with its doorframe. Dean could hear Andy mutter "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck" from where the boys were huddled behind him and Sam. Distantly, in the back of his mind, Dean thought that now would be the time for an inspiring speech, if he were that kind of person and if they were in Braveheart. He wasn't, though, and they weren't. In reality, as all this was passing through his mind in a detached way, he was already in motion, striding towards the room the lindworm had chosen and not caring if Fall Out Boy were emotionally ready. If Dean could kill it first, they wouldn't even have to worry about it.
Sam's eyesight hadn't failed him. Dean finally saw it for the first time, and he could see why Sam had been so immediately sure it was a dragon. The thing was huge, serpentine and wet with some kind of nasty-smelling black sheen. Its wings flapped uselessly, too small to carry its weight into the air but large enough to terrify. The occupants of the room were reduced to leftover meat, mere morsels hanging from between the monster's hideous fangs. And its face…it had no face, just thick black smears of that revolting goo where its eyes might be, and a sheer, lipless hole for a mouth, immense and toothy but unlike the mouth of any earthly animal.
The reason Dean could see its face so clearly was because it had turned in his direction, approaching him with obvious intent. He didn't think the fur pants were working.
"You distract it, I'll try to get him from behind," Sam said quickly, leaving Dean with the quaking band boys behind him.
It wasn't too hard to distract it, since its attention was already fully on Dean. Fully on Dean's innards, to be exact, and probably his tasty muscles too. It was great for Sam's plan, but maybe not so great for Dean's overall wellbeing. Dean retreated backwards, trying to draw it out towards the hall in order to give Sam more space behind it. Unfortunately, he missed the wrecked gap of the door by barely a metre and found he'd backed himself into a wall. "Shit."
Dean struck at the beast's alarmingly nearby face with the sword in his hands, but it was as though the thing didn't even notice. Not only did the sword not hurt it, it slid off its slimy scales like water off the Impala's hood after a careful waxing. It wouldn't pierce, wouldn't even scratch or leave the slightest indentation. Dean made a feeble attempt to poink it in its general eye area. It roared in his face and knocked the sword out of Dean's hands with one of its wings. Its breath was really, really bad.
Unarmed and pinned to the wall, staring down forty rows of teeth and a leathery-looking tongue, all Dean could think was "these goddamned furry pants don't even work; my corpse is going to look so lame wearing them."
To his left, just outside of the room, he heard Patrick shout, "Dean, here!"
He turned just in time to catch the sabre Patrick threw at him, almost caught it by the blade but managed with some fumbling to not cut his own hand wide open. Sabre in hand but not at all confident in its effectiveness against the monster, Dean looked back at it to find that it wasn't interested in him anymore.
It had heard Patrick's voice, and was now making a beeline for him.
At that same moment, Sam finally made his move, springing from behind the giant worm and burying his own sword into the softness of its belly. In theory, anyway. In practice, Sam's sword slid off its belly like soap. Sam tried again for good measure. It was like trying to stab a block of titanium with a banana peel.
"Uhh, Sam?" Dean called as he quickly scrambled away from where he'd previously been cornered.
"Run," Sam answered.
Dean hightailed it out into the hall, directed Fall Out Boy with a wave of his hand to follow him, and all five of them sprinted out to the parking lot. Dean leapt into the Impala and slammed the gas pedal to the floor, wincing at the sound of the engine choking slightly. "Sorry, girl, but Sammy's in trouble."
He drove through some bushes and across a lawn bearing the hotel's logo mowed into the grass, pulling up near where he guesstimated the room's bathroom window would face.
Sam timed his jump badly, landing more on the Impala than next to it. At the impact, Dean winced again, more for his old girl than for his brother if he was completely honest. Sam rolled off and climbed into the passenger's seat. Dean had the accelerator down to the floor again before Sam's ass touched leather.
He took off wide, going straight from lawn to main road without bothering to circle back to the parking lot. He hoped the boys were smart enough to not still be waiting there. His assessment of their relative intelligence proved to be correct, and he saw the van already on the road just ahead of where he merged.
"So much for hairy britches," Dean said, once Sam's breathing had normalised. They were back on the highway and no more than one car's length behind the van.
"So much for running it through with a sword," Sam replied, sounding a little shaky but not too much worse for wear. "The good news is, it's clumsy. It couldn't catch me because I was behind it and it took forever to turn itself around. So at least we know its size can be a disadvantage."
"Unfortunately, it also seems to have the advantage of being invincible."
Sam sighed, dropping his head back into the headrest. "So, what do we do now?"
"Fuck if I know, Sammy. Fuck if I know."
* * * * *
continue to part three